Blog CRC1646

From July 21^st to 25th 2025, the First Summer School on Linguistic Creativity was hosted by the CRC 1646 „Linguistic Creativity in Communication“. International experts and participants came to Bielefeld University to discuss linguistic creativity in different fields, gain insight into various methods and engage in scientific exchange. We welcomed our external participants with a joint dinner at the Finca Bar Celona on Sunday (20.07.), before the Summer School started the next day.

The summer school program splits into workshops in the morning and working groups in the afternoon. On the first two days (Monday, 21.07, and Tuesday, 22.07.), the workshops were about the theoretic foundations of creativity in Syntax and Semantics/Pragmatics as well as the role of individual differences and social context for creative ideation.

Creativity in Syntax

Jutta Hartmann, speaker of the CRC, and Anke Himmelreich held the workshop on creativity in (minimalist) syntax. They gave an introduction into current assumptions and core concepts of the Minimalist framework, such as the operations Merge and Move, as well as an overview of the definitions of creativity within the CRC. The main research question that this theory-driven workshop aimed to answer was how such creative (morpho-)syntactic structures can be described in a fixed conventional system such as Generative Grammar and how analogy as a core mechanism can be used to explain different syntactic phenomena such as long-distance island extractions.

Individual Differences

This workshop was divided into three parts:

By giving a historical overview of the development of experimental approaches and reasonings Annett Jorschick, from Bielefeld University, showed how individual differences became increasingly important in experimental research, shifting the focus from purely observing group-level differences to individual personality traits. This was followed by considerations on the statistical modeling of individual differences and the challenges and pitfalls associated with it.

Nils Frederik Tolksdorf, from Heidelberg University, addressed individual differences in children, like linguistic abilities and temperamental shyness. We learned about the role it plays in children‘s creative and adaptive strategies in interactive language learning settings with humans and social robots.

The workshop was rounded off by Katalin Havas and Martin Wegrzyn, from Bielefeld University, with a focus on the creative process itself. In this hands-on session, we looked at the connection between verbal fluency behavior and creative products in the Divergent Association Task based on self-collected data. Other factors, such as IQ and personality traits, were also discussed.

Semantics/Pragmatics

Bob van Tiel, from Radboud University Nijmegen, was the lecturer for the Semantics/Pragmatics workshop. After he made the basics of pragmatics accessible to everyone, he engaged with us in a discussion about lexical scales. We learned that such lexical scales are everywhere: While the prominent example some vs. all is well researched, Bob drew our attention to other scales like between big and small, or small and tiny. On the basis of different experiments in the field, we discussed theoretical insights and methodological considerations.

The workshops on Wednesday, 23.07., and Thursday, 24.07., were about methods for investigating linguistic creativity, covering Corpus Analysis, Acceptability Judgements and Multimodal Creativity Research.

Corpus Analysis

In the workshop given by Nils Reiter, from University of Cologne, the participants examined annotation as a research practice, beginning with how to design effective annotation guidelines from scratch. The workshop gave an opportunity to discuss strategies for evaluating annotations, to explore what these evaluations reveal, as well as to consider different ways of structuring annotation rounds in practice. The participants also looked at how machine learning models can be used to support and accelerate the annotation process, with opportunities to explore their potential in practice.

Acceptability Judgments

The workshop led by Thomas Weskott, from University of Göttingen, focused on the methodologies and considerations related to acceptability judgments in linguistic research. Key discussion topics included the debate on using continuous versus discrete measurement scales and the role of benchmarking. The workshop also provided knowledge on applying this method in controlled experimental settings and demonstrated analytical tools for evaluating and visualizing judgment data in R. A particular emphasis was placed on imparting descriptive and inferential statistical knowledge for analyzing linguistic intuition.

Multimodal Creativity Research

Hans Rutger Bosker, from Radboud University Nijmegen, led a two-day hands-on workshop on multimodal creativity research. After presenting insights from experiments conducted in the SPEAC Lab, he invited the participants to design their own mini-experiment, run it online, and analyze the results in the second session. By creating our own experiment and discussing the outcomes, we gained a deeper understanding of multimodality and its potential in research.

On Friday, 24.07., two parallel workshops on fundamentals took place:

Verbal protocols

Lena Heine, from Ruhr University Bochum, introduced the methodology of verbal protocols. She guided us through the underlying framework of the interdependency of thoughts and language and illustrated the strengths of offline methods in cognition research as well as the challenges in the interpretation of verbal protocols by using examples from an educational context.

Visualization in R

Elen Le Foll, from University of Cologne, gave an introduction to data visualization in the R programming language. She highlighted key features and demonstrated useful functions and packages for data visualization. During the session, participants not only reflected on data visualization in general but also had the opportunity to experiment with R themselves.

In the afternoon of each day, there were working groups with different talks from participants, who took the opportunity to present their research to each other. External participants talked for example about creative cursings in Tunesian Arabic and orthographical and lexical creativity in Luxembourgish youth chats. Internal talks presented current work within the different CRC projects (see below for all presentations).

Of course, the summer school was accompanied by social events. For example, we played board games together and even visited a medieval market.

All in all, it was an all-round successful summer school that has whetted our appetite for the next one. We are looking forward to hosting the DGfS Summer School in Bielefeld next year. So save the date for it: August 10th–21st!

External and internal talks were:

Mareike Hartmann (C03): Exploring Linguistic Creativity in Naming and Interaction: Creative Expressions as a Pathway to Communicative Success in Individuals with Neurological Language and Communication Disorders

Lotta Heidemann (C03): Patterns of Multimodal Creativity in People with Neurogenic Speech and Language disorders

Afef Labben (University of Tunis): Creative Impoliteness: An Interdisciplinary Study of Cursing in Tunisian Arabic

Eleonore Laubenstein (A04): To Agree or not to Agree, that is the Conflict: Exploring Verbal Agreement with Disjunctive Subjects in German

Melissa Mujkić (University of Luxembourg): Orthographical and Lexical Creativity in Luxembourgish Youth Chats

Tijana Šuković (University of Belgrade): How Creative and Context-Dependent are Non-Lexicalized Occurrences with Proper Nouns in English?

Jiaxuan Xie (University of Aberdeen): Linguistic Creativity and Gendered Pragmatic Misalignment in Autistic Women: A Cross-Cultural Sociolinguistic Analysis

The Program of the Summer School

The Research Training Group (RTG)

The DGfS-Summer School 2026 in Bielefeld

Elen Le Foll    ©Anamaria Koci, SFB 1646

Mareike Hartmann    ©Anamaria Koci, SFB 1646

Lotta Heidemann    ©Anamaria Koci, SFB 1646

Eleonore Laubenstein    ©Anamaria Koci, SFB 1646

Invitation to the DGfS Summer School 2026    ©Anamaria Koci, SFB 1646